Robert Keller - Blood Brothers Volume 2: 25 Terrifying African American Serial Killers

The Cookie Monster

He's not a killer, he's a lover. Joel S. Moldovsky, Harrison Graham's defense attorney.

The Seventies and Eighties were a horrific period in the annals of American crime, an era during which many of the countrys most notorious serial killers emerged. Barely a year passed without some new and terrifying monster being introduced via the nations media The Hillside Strangler, the Son of Sam, Zodiac. Some Bundy, Gacy, Ramirez, among them became household names, the quintessential bogeymen of the age. For a time, it seemed like no major American city was without its own, monstrous neighborhood psycho.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was no exception. In the early Eighties, a psychopath known only as the Frankford Slasher, hacked and stabbed seven women to death in the vicinity of the El (elevated railroad) along Frankford Avenue. Then there was Gary Heidnik, a stock market genius and wannabe clergyman, who kept several women captive in his basement, killing two of them and reportedly cannibalizing their corpses. Finally, there was Harrison Graham, a mentally retarded handyman who fashioned himself on Sesame Streets Cookie Monster and liked to collect corpses.

On August 9, 1987, a sweltering Sunday in the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia PD officers were called to a two-room apartment in a run-down building in north Philly. The tenant, an African-American man named Harrison Graham, had been evicted that day due to a terrible stench coming from his rooms. Landlord Nathanial Choice had sent his son and nephew to order Graham to leave, which hed done without protest. The men had then entered the filthy apartment and found one of the doors nailed shut. One of them had crouched down and peeked through the keyhole. What hed seen had sent him scuttling into the passage to throw up. It had also given him cause to call the police.

It was mid-afternoon when Officer Pete Scallatino arrived at 1631 North 19th Street. The area was extremely rundown, with dilapidated buildings, many of them boarded up and abandoned. The apartment block hed been called to certainly fit that description, although the two men waiting on the sidewalk assured him that there were still several tenants living there.

Scallatino followed the men up to the third-floor apartment, his nose assaulted by the horrendous smell coming from the other side of the door - garbage and excrement and, underlying it all, the unmistakable stench of death. He fully expected to find a decomposing body in the apartment, yet he was unprepared for what he did find. Garbage lay waist deep in places, there were blood smears on the walls and someone had evidently kept a dog in here, without bothering to pick up the excrement.

The men called Scallatino over to the keyhole, and peering through, he saw what had alarmed them, the naked legs of an African-American woman. By this time Charles Johnson, an investigator with the Medical Examiner's Office, had arrived on the scene and he and Scallatino forced the door open.

If the smell in the other room had been bad, the reek that wafted out from this one was positively toxic. Johnson handed Scallatino a gauze mask then donned one himself before the officers entered the room. This space, too, was piled high with trash, but what held their attention was the naked corpse lying on a badly stained mattress. Bloating and discoloration indicated that shed been dead for some time and decomposition was already fairly advanced. She was also not the only corpse in the room. Next to the mattress lay another bloated cadaver, this one clothed in a denim miniskirt.